Date: Sun, 26 Oct 1997 23:29:32 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710270429.XAA18144@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: HACKER G N Sender: Lojban list From: HACKER G N Subject: Re: What's going on here? X-To: Lojban List To: John Cowan In-Reply-To: <0EIO00ADZJIWIP@newcastle.edu.au> X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 7856 Lines: 141 On Sat, 25 Oct 1997, Chris Bogart wrote: > On Sun, 26 Oct 1997, HACKER G N wrote: > > Incidentally, I'm not entirely convinced that the "ser"/"estar" > > distinction is especially objective. > > Fair enough. I wonder that myself -- but take it as an example. Another > example might be learning the names for subtle color differences: taupe > and tan, cream and eggshell. Yeah, I gave the Welsh colour word 'glas' as an example a couple of letters ago, I believe. The boundaries of different colours can be EXTREMELY subjective, language for language. > Someone who knows the names might be a > better judge of color than someone who doesn't, although it would be very > hard to say whether the chicken or the egg came first. That's what I think. Learning to use a word PROPERLY will by definition train you in the distinctions necessary to use that word. Nevertheless, you can make that distinction in principle whether there is a handy word for it or not in your language, I think. > > > In cases where a concept is especially difficult to express briefly in a > > native language, we generally just borrow the word or phrase that > > expresses it from the other language. > > OK, but I think borrowing is useful for more than just interpersonal > communication. > > Although you say in another message that you don't believe you think "in" > any language, I'm not decided on that issue regarding my own thoughts. > Maybe I switch back and forth between thinking-in-words and > thinking-in-gestalts-or-whathaveyou. Well, one reason that I don't think I think "in" any language, is that when there are words in my head, I am always aware of the thought I have BEFORE I construct the language for that thought in real time. My thoughts seem gestalt, but my language seems linear. They seem like different things. > But I do know that when I'm trying > to clarify a concept in my own mind, I typically have a running dialog in > my head with an imaginary skeptic, with whom I have to be pretty precise > because he'll pick nits and poke holes in my arguments. Is that just me > or does everyone do that? I do that too, and I started it at university when I first started studying philosophy and sociology and I learned about dialectic. I thought, "Yeah, that's brilliant! I'm going to use that to evolve my thoughts more!" There can be a lot of theatrical linguistic commentary that goes on when you think like this, yet I am still aware, especially when arguing with someone else in real time, that a very CLEAR intuitive apprehension of the situation comes to me before the words do. First comes what Robert M. Pirsig called the Quality, and then comes the linear mapping of that Quality into specific boundaries and domains. That's where the logic and the language comes into it. Also, let me clarify: I think that consciously studying a language like Lojban that makes distinctions that some people are not used to making, can sharpen your thinking skills - but I don't think that that comes from the language directly, but rather about the THINKING and analysis of the language. I think that language doesn't shape thought so much as thought shapes thought. And then I think thought shapes language. :) > Anyway, a borrowed or coined word might help > that process along, and thereby help in my thinking, not just in my > external communication with other (real) people. Maybe. But the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis sounds to me like the tail wagging the dog. A borrowed word can make you more confident about an existing thought in your head, and you might even make the word a focus of your thought. But if language placed some kinds of restrictions on thinking, there is this further problem that gets raised: Take a language that has clear grammatical ambiguities like English. I still know perfectly well what I MEANT to say, even if someone can come along and give it a different, albeit crazy, interpretation, like mountains flying over Zurich with dove wings, or something, to take a much earlier linguistic example. Yet even though I might have to think to reword the sentence so it avoids overt alternative interpretations, I still don't have to think to know what I originally meant. So there's still something going on there independently of the language, I think. > > (.i da'i no drata be mi cu pensi ta'i la'edi'u .inaja ba'a .o'unairo'a do'o > jinvi ledu'u mi fenki zo'o) vau u'i i mi na jinvi ledu'u do nitcu lenu xanka la'edi'u It reminds me of when I did postgraduate research in philosophy. It sometimes involved inventing new terms so I could describe better what I meant. If you use language at all, to yourself or someone else, you tend naturally to use terms that concisely convey your thoughts, and I think that this close supervenience of language with thought can cause confusion about the relationship between the two things. Language is of course extremely important, but I cannot say that I have ever felt caged by it, hence my skepticism about the SWH. > > > But in terms of actually making the distinction at all, you don't need a > > language to do that, you just make the distinction. What a language can do > > is find a convenient way of expressing that distinction to others. > > For me at least, though, it could help me think about the matter more > smoothly, and therefore more quickly or more often, at least within a > certain category of thinking. Well, words do pick up intuitive and emotional associations with time. Possibly the use of a word will trigger some associations within you faster. I suppose that is possible. But then again, this seems more something that occurs when you think consciously about language, to me, because a native speaker is not really very aware of all the different characteristics of the grammar and vocabulary that they employ; it is in the BACKGROUND, not the foreground. Hence, the languages that will influence more what you think, if this happens, will be the second languages more likely than the first ones. There was somebody who was saying this a while ago on this list, that it was a problem with Whorf's work on Hopi. The people who reported influences in their thoughts were learning Hopi as a second language, where Hopi's characteristics were in their foreground. But the thoughts of native speakers are not thus affected because those linguistic features are in their background. > > This is all very theoretical -- I have no idea how I could ever prove this > to myself for sure, much less anyone else. But I suppose that's an > inherent problem when discussing something as immeasurable as "thought". > Yeah. Well, I'm good at Lojban, and I think my thinking improves with the more material I learn, linguistic or otherwise. I also always use terms that concisely convey my meaning, from wherever one normally gets them. But one thing to remember is that all a new term needs to represent a new thought is to be DIFFERENT from different phrases or words that represent different thoughts, and in any natural language, this is fairly easy to do, whether it be through slang, or figuratively, or in technical terms that are coined for journals. And the concepts build on the concepts just as the terms build on the terms, ad infinitum. What I find thought-provoking about Lojban is that it is different, and studying it does make you look at other things that you might otherwise not have given much thought about. It just all seems to me to amount to something weaker than Sapir-Whorf, 'cause I can still say that philosophy did a helluva lot more to improve my thinking than any set of linguistic study. So my hunch is it's thinking that tends to improve thinking. Anyway, there you have it.... :) Geoff